Abstract

Understanding source codes written by other programmers are difficult particularly when the system document is not properly updated. Even worse some software systems are not produced together with their system documents. In spite of many Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools available in the market, software engineers still face the problems related to software documentation. Thus reverse engineering or software visualization workbenches might be helpful to assist their program comprehension activity. This paper describes a software visualization prototype tool called DocLike Viewer that employs an enhanced method of software visualization. The method is DocLike Modularized Graph (DMG) that enables software engineers especially software maintainers to graphically visualize the reverse engineered software artifacts to understand existing software systems prior to making changes in a document-like, modularized way.